When I learned about kde-look.org a couple of days ago, I checked it out and liked what I saw. I then looked at themes.org and noticed that it's down again, with traffic being directed toward the old ("classic") site. There are lessons to be learned here, I think. If I may be so bold as to offer the following advice to the kde-look.org maintainers:

"Lessons to learn from themes.org":
1. Quality counts. Don't accept every variation on a theme, just for the numbers. Themes.org was always flooded with submissions, but most of them were just previous themes with a different color scheme. I used to use Enlightenment before switching to KDE, and I can tell you, a truly interesting and creative theme would only come out once every three to six months. All the others were...well, I'm going to get flamed, but they were honestly uncreative crap. For those of you who remember when AbsolutE came out, think of how many clones popped up; most of them just changed the colors around. There were hundreds of themes at e.themes.org, and I looked through all of them, but honestly, the number could have been trimmed down to ten or twenty. Rewarding quality over quantity will have two results: one, you will encourage people to be more creative, resulting in better schemes/themes. Two, you will make life easier on yourself when it comes to update the website/database. I suspect part of themes.org's problem is that it simply has too many themes, most of which are unnecessarily dragging it down.

2. People want themes, not a website experience. The lesson from themes.org is painfully clear: if for some reason, kde-look.org goes down, gets wiped/cracked/whatever, and you have to rebuild from scratch, don't let your fans wait for six months. They will leave. If you have to put up a plain-text site, do it. Don't decide, "Hmm, well, it's time to update the look of the site, people can wait." They won't. Witness the flames on the themes.org message board. I'm not one of those flamers. I was willing to wait for one of two things: either themes.org comes back, or another site takes its place. The second has occured. This surfer is going to take his hit traffic to another site. Sorry. Content is more important to me than layout. Themes.org looks (or did, for the brief amount of time that the new site was up) gorgeous, but there was nothing there. Oops.

I'm sure there's more, but it's still early in the morning. I am looking forward to neurotically checking the site for new themes every day. :) All I ask is that you do ONE thing, and do it well: give us a place to find and post themes. Then you will be greatly loved, and great will be your reward. Thanks, guys!

Actually, part of the reason for redesigning themes.org is to accomodate your first comment; allowing the person who posted a theme to add variants of it, so if someone has minor changes like recoloring, the original theme author can choose to make them available without cluttering up the main site - minor variants will not be accepted as main theme submissions anymore. (At least that's what I was told by some themes.org people, I could be wrong.)

>I can tell you, a truly interesting and creative theme would only come out once every three to six months. All the others were...well, I'm going to get flamed, but they were honestly uncreative crap.>

It is a matter of taste. What is in your opinion 'crap' it is not 'crap' to others. Or better said: what is not crap today it becomes crap tomorrow. I used to use Aqua clones for a couple of weeks, and then I got sick and tired of them. Now I think they are all crap (including Apple's original Aqua style), but many other people don't have the same taste. For them is Aqua style probably the most beautiful theme (or style). And we have to respect that. And Aqua clones are the most downloaded themes & styles on themes.org and will be, I am sure, the most downloaded styles & themes on kde-look.org.
AbsoluteE is beautiful to you, but (I'm sorry) it is IMHO ugly.

>Rewarding quality over quantity will have two results: one, you will encourage people to be more creative, resulting in better schemes/themes >

I am not so sure. I think we need a really good tutorial on how to create themes and styles (not coded, but pixmap's ones).

P.S. IMHO, kde-look.org is very nice, and it is very good idea to have all possible themes and styles (which can be used in kde) in one place: kde ones, icewm ones, gtk, noatun, icons... :)

I think it's pretty easy to draw a minimal line. For one, no blatent rip-offs, changing jsut the color scheme. Different color schemes should be grouped under the parent theme, if at all.

> It is a matter of taste. What is in your opinion 'crap' it is not 'crap' to others.

Ok, how about this: if a theme drops off in popularity after a set amount of time (is two-three months reasonable?) it's yanked. In other words, let the users vote with their downloads. Now, granted, some themes are super popular and have their peak, then trail off. Special provisions should be made for these. But can anyone justify keeping a theme that is close to two years old and only has a few hundred downloads, most of them from the first week?

> AbsoluteE is beautiful to you, but (I'm sorry) it is IMHO ugly.

Apology accepted. I think AbsolutE is hideous, too. I was using it as an example of something that has been ripped, duplicated, and copied a hundred times.

> I am not so sure. I think we need a really good tutorial on how to create themes and styles (not coded, but pixmap's ones).

Hear, hear! I would really love to make a theme with vertical text (the title bar on the left side) but have no idea, because there's no documentation!
:Peter

I see your point about posting small variations, but I for one like having a lot of variants available. A lot of times I find one or two variants on a main theme that I really like, whereas all the other variants (and the original theme) I don't. It seems like a good solution would be to just list variants under their "original" theme (if there is an original even; but then how can you call any Aqua-like KDE theme the original when the original is Apple's?)

Also, I was just wondering why the B II, KStep, etc. Kwin styles look so *different* from the styles they were patterned after (in this case BeOS and *Step, respectively)? I can understand artistic license, but these styles bear hardly any resemblance to the originals. I'd think one might as well come up with different names for them.

So says the person who stated that it dosen't work because it dosen't work for him. I downloaded the KDE 2.1 rpms for SuSE 7.1, and then went to themes.org. I downloaded about three or so themes, installed them, and then installed them in the Control Center. It worked fine. I think I'm using the eazel theme, as everytime I load up a gtk app, it repeats the following seven times:

But everything *looks* like it's supposed to, according to the corresponding screenshot, and I've not had any problems with xmms or lopster, the only two non-KDE apps I really use (not that XMMS uses the theme).

I've tried all of them, none of them work here :(
I've tried them on all versions of KDE 2xx :(
When I import one it totally screws up my fonts. They become
so small that they are unreadable. Then I import second one and my fonts
become even smaller etc.
I've asked many places (also on mailing lists)for help, nobody ever gave me an answer about the problem. I mostly always compile kde sources, but distros rpms
have the same problem.

The 'liquid' widget style itself is adequate.
The menu styling on the other hand is very good -- they should be seperated out from the theme, and put in the base KDE libs so that users can have transparent menus with any style.

I compile the theme source code on Mandrake 8.1 but It mentioned errors:
-- liquidclient.h:5:20: client.h: No such file or directory
-- liquidclient.cpp:15:28: kwin/workspace.h: No such file or directory
-- liquidclient.cpp:16:26: kwin/options.h: No such file or directory

not... download and compiled his liquid engine last week (had to manually move a lot files about to get it to work) and checked his site just now for an update.... It claims he is no longer doing anything with linux.....

Hi, I have installed the theme, but I don't get 'Liquid' in the Style category of 'Appearance & Themes'. I get all the others (Colors, Window Decoration...) but not the style. What I really want are the transparent menus. Anyone know why this happens?? Thanks.
Derek.

Though Rik or Rikkus has Program/coded tutorial, but we are Lacking Pixmapped tutorial much like Mosfet's, which is still a bit unclear on many things. I had to discover by wasting many hours how to create an icon theme, and still and I am not sure.

Simply, putting it:

Users can create themes/styles if proper documentation is provided, but those who knows doesn't wish to share like Mosfet!? Please somebody create somewhat quick-tutorial for:

1. Themes (of theme manager)
2. Pixmap Style
3. Sound
4. Icon

so that users can contribute to our beautiful KDE. I would have created one if I knew about it (themes know-how).

By the way there is a very nice theme 'QNix' which is superbly style coded for KDE.

Anyway a long awaited site is here. Many thanks to the folks who created such intuitive and nice KDE themes site.

well, there is a KStep window decoration and there is a STep-kde style and theres a Pale Grey color scheme that can make your desktop VERY next-step'ish heres a screenshot: http://tokyoeye.rgv.net/kdestep.png

Btw, I found that replacing the back and forward buttons from galeon (the mozilla-small theme or something) makes konqueror look alot nicer. these are the small (24x24) blue rounded icons I'm talking about.

However, the icon with the arrow pointing up is a little hard to clone (i rotated it 90 degrees left, but it's ugly... the button's gradient isn't right).

Hey,
This is really nice.
I don't know much about qnx, but are the icons exactly the same?
Any license problems with that?
I think KDE would come with a different default theme.
Maybe this one could be the one.
I really love the antialiasing thing.
I hope that XFree guys finush with the Sis 630 driver for Xfree 4 soon!

I haven't managed to make it work without the framebuffer.
It works but, you know: No QUAKE and no RENDERER extension.
That sucks.
I think it's the combination of sis 630 + TFT what doesn't work.
Any one has managed to make it work with hardware acceleration?